SAP Promises to Accelerate Innovation with Leonardo Service Packages

SAP is following up the launch of a digital innovation system it calls Leonardo with a set of services to help enterprises more quickly, and easily gain the benefits of the Internet of Things, blockchain and big data.

The three SAP Leonardo Innovation Services launched at the company’s “Leonardo Live” event in Frankfurt includes an “express edition” with predefined bundles of its cloud service and other products, along with an “open innovation edition” for projects that require greater customization. An enterprise edition will offer similar customization but extend the scope of the services to multiple departments or use cases in the same organization.

Leonardo is not a single product but a set of tools that includes an in-memory cloud service to rapidly build and deploy enterprise applications. Other components include tools for integrating machine learning and data from the Internet of Things.

Meinolf Kaimann, SAP’s vice-president and Global Head PE Product Management, SAP Digital Business Management, said the Leonardo Innovation Services reflect the different stages an organization might be on in terms of digital transformation.

“In the old days of IT, you’d be looking at project lifecycles of 18 months,” he told B2BNN. “Now companies are expected to do innovations within weeks, or a maximum of three months.”

The enterprise version reflects the fact that, according to Kaimann, a successful innovation rarely stays siloed in the enterprise for long.

“We start the creative process for one person at one location, and soon there are five, 10 or 20 innovation use cases added on,” he said, referencing a customer that produces floor material where SAP was brought in to help with an eight-week project. “The CIO wound up with 19 innovation use cases on their desk that the business wanted to do with them.”

The enterprise edition of Leonardo Innovation Services includes some additional features to help ensure CIOs aren’t overwhelmed by the demand, Kaimann said. This includes a showroom with examples of similar projects from other SAP customers, a digital design zone to collaborate directly with SAP experts and “empowerment sessions,” two-day workshops where SAP can help customers build what Kaimann called “low-fidelity prototypes” of potential solutions.

Writing on the Enterprise Irregulars blog, industry analyst Vinnie Mirchandani said SAP’s strategy with Leonardo looks promising, so long as the company looks beyond back-office and horizontal functionality.

“I think SAP is at a crossroads – it needs to get serious about modernizing its industry solutions,” he said. “It needs to focus Leonardo and its ecosystem on product and revenue-centric processes at its customers.”

Kaimann said SAP is very focused on industry needs. That’s why, even though the company also launched a Leonardo IoT Bridge tool to ingest and manage data from sensor networks, its services teams won’t necessarily be pushing IoT exclusively.

“You should never start from a technology perspective,” he said. “Start with the business scenario and then identify the best solution for that scenario.”

Beyond offering its own services, SAP is working with consulting firms such as Deloitte and Accenture in its ecosystem of Leonardo partners.

Shane Schick

Shane Schick is the Editor-in-Chief of B2B News Network. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Marketing magazine and has also been Vice-President, Content & Community (Editor-in-Chief), at IT World Canada, a technology columnist with the Globe and Mail and was the founding editor of ITBusiness.ca.
Shane has been recognized for journalistic excellence by the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance and the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.